Maggie Cassidy (3 page)

Never dreaming, was I, poor Jack Duluoz, that the soul is dead. That from Heaven grace descends, the ministers thereof . . . No Doctor Pisspot Poorpail to tell me; no example inside my first and only skin. That love is the heritage, and cousin to death. That the only love can only be the first love, the only death the last, the only life within, and the only word . . . choked forever.

It was at the dance. The Rex Ballroom; with coat attendants in a drafty hall, a window, coatroom racks, fresh snow spilled on the boards; the rosy girls and handsome boys running in, the boys clacking heels, the girls in high heels, short dresses of the Thirties showing sexy legs. With awe we teenagers gave up our coats, got our brass disks, walked into the great sigh of the ballroom all six with fear, unknown sorrows. The band was on the stand, a young band, some seventeen-year-old musicians, tenors, trombones; an old pianist; a young leader; they struck up the sad lament of a ballad. “
The smoke from my cigarette climbs
through the air
. . . .” The dancers met, engaged, shuffled; powder on the floor; lights playing in polkadots around the hall with its upstairs balcony where cool young sitters watched. The six boys stood at the entrance undecided, raw, foolish; turning sheepish smiles to one another for support; starting off in a halting gang, down the wall, past the wallflowers, the cold windows of winter, the seats, the other gangs of boys stiff collared and slick; the sudden group of jitterbugs with long hair and pegged pants. A bird of sadness whirled slowly around the room with the polkadots, singing love and death. . . . “
The walls of my room fade away in the blue and I'm deep in a dream of you
. . . .”

A jitterbug kid we knew was there. Whitey St. Claire from Cheever Street, long hair, pegged pants, bushy eyebrows, a strange serious interesting look, five feet tall, flashy dissipated rings under his eyes. “Oh Gene Krupa is the maddest drummer in the world! I saw him in Boston! He was the end! Look, you guys gotta learn to jitterbug! Watch!” With his little male partner Chummy Courval, who was even shorter and inconceivably sadder and more glamorous and with a button-down lounge lapel longer than almost his whole body, he joined hands and dug in heels in the floor and they flammed and whammed to show us.

Us, the gang: “What funny guys!”

“Amazing maniacs!”

“Did you hear what he said? Sixteen blondes fainted!”

“What a way to dance—I wish I could do it!”

“Now we'll get to meet some girls and throw em on the couch you babe!”

“We'll smoke them reefers and become big sex fiends you babe! Zeet?”

Whitey introduced me to Maggie. “I tried and tried to work that chick!” I saw her, standing in the crowd, forlorn, dissatisfied, dark, unpleasantly strange. Half reluctantly we were brought together and paraded to the floor arm in arm.

Maggie Cassidy—that in its time must have been Casa d'Oro—sweet, dark, rich as peaches—dim to the senses like a great sad dream—

“I suppose you're wondering what an Irish girl can be doing at a New Year's Eve dance unescorted,” she said to me on the dancefloor; I, dope, had before danced only once, with Pauline Cole, high school sweetheart. (“
She'll be jealous
!” I enjoyed the thought.)

I didnt know what to say to Maggie, slavish I tied my tongue to the gate.

“Oh come on—say, you're a football player Whitey said.

“Whitey?”

“Whitey that introduced us, dummy.”

It pleased me to be called a name, as though she was a younger sister—

“Do you get hurt often? my brother Roy gets hurt all the time that's why I hate football. I suppose you like it. You've got a bunch of friends. They look like a nice bunch of fellas—Do you know Jimmy Noonan in Lowell High?” She was nervous, curious, gossipy, womany: at the same time suddenly she'd caress me, say, at this early beginning, the necktie, adjust it; or push back my uncombed hair; something maternal, fleet, sorry. My hands clawed into fists to think of her when I got home that night. For, just ripened, the flesh bulged and was firm from under her shiny dress belt; her mouth pouted soft, rich, red, her black curls adorned sometimes the snow-smooth brow; up from her lips came rosy auras hinting all her health and merriness, seventeen years old. She leaned on one leg with the laze of a Spanish cat, a Spanish Carmen; she turned throwing fecund hair in quick knowing sorrying glances; she herself jeweled in the mirror; I looked blankly over her head to think of other things.

“Got a girl?”

“In high school—Pauline Cole is my girl, I met her under the clock every afternoon after third bell—” Iddyboy's rapid homeward walk now far away news in this new head of mine.

“And you tell me right away you got a girl!” Her teeth at first didnt seem attractive; her chin had a little doublechin of beauty, if the men will understand . . . that unnamed dimple chin, to perfection, and Spanish—her lip curled, slightly parted teeth charmed and enhanced sensuous, drowning lips, devourous lips; so at first you saw the little pearly teeth—

“You're probably an honest boy—You're French Canadian aintcha? I bet all the girls go for you, I bet you're gonna be a big success.” I was going to grow up to walk in sleet in fields; didnt know it then.

“Oh—” blushing—“not exactly—”

“But you're only sixteen years old, you're younger than me, I'm seventeen—” She brooded and bit her rich lips: my soul began its first sink into her, deep, heady, lost; like drowning in a witches' brew, Keltic, sorcerous, starlike. “That makes me old enough ha ha,” and she laughed her own incomprehensible girly jokes as I put my hard arm around her soft waist and took her dancing awkward dumb steps under the balloons and crinkly pop funhats of New Year's Eve America and the world orange and black like the Snow Hallowe'en, dumb and swallowing in my ignorance and position in time—People watching us saw the girl, timid, pretty, rather small-faced in a small hair crown but on closer inspection cameo-like in choiceness but no paleness eyes therein, the gimlet fires in the beauty showed; and the boy, me, Jacky Duluoz, kid of writeups, track teams, home and believing goodheartedness with just a touch of the Canuck half-Indian doubt and suspicion of all things non-Canuck, non-half-Indian—a lout—the order of the lout on my arm—They saw this boy well-brushed though not combed consciously, still a kid, Suddenly big as a man, awkward, etc.—with serious blue-eyed pensive countryboy countenance sitting in gray high school halls in button-down sweater no water on his hair as photographer snaps line of home roomers—Boy and girl, arms around each other, Maggie and Jack, in the sad ball floor of life, already crestfallen, corners of the mouth giving up, shoulders loosening to hang, frowns, minds forewarned—love is bitter, death is sweet.

The Concord River flows by her house, in July evening the ladies of Massachusetts Street are sitting on wooden doorsteps with newspapers for fans, on the river the starlight shines. The fireflies, the moths, the bugs of New England summer rattlebang on screens, the moon looms huge and brown over Mrs. McInerney's tree. Little Buster O'Day is coming up the road with his wagon, torn knees, punching it through holes in the unpaved ground, the streetlamp dropping a brown vast halo bugswept on his little homeward figure. Still, and soft, the stars on the river run.

The Concord River, scene of sand embankments, railroad bridges, reeds, bullfrogs, dye mills—copses of birch, vales, in winter the dreaming white—but now in July midsummer the stars roll vast and shiny over its downward flow to the Merrimack. The railroad train crashes over the bridges; the children beneath, among the tar poles, are swimming naked. The engine's fire glow is red as it goes over, flares of deep hell are thrown on the little figures. Maggie is there, the dogs are there, little fires . . .

The Cassidys live on Massachusetts Street at No. 31—it's a wood house, seven rooms, apple tree in back; chimney; porch, with screen, and swing; no sidewalk; rickety fence against which in June tall sunflowers lean at noon for wild and tender hallucinations of little infants playing there with wagons. The father James Cassidy is an Irishman, brakeman on the Boston and Maine; soon conductor; the mother, a former O'Shaughnessy with dove's eyes still in her long-lost face of love now face of life.

The river comes between lovely shores narrowing. Bungalows scatter the landscape. The tannery's over to the west. Little grocery stores with wood fences and dusty paths, grass, some drying-out wood at noon, the ring ding of the little bell, kids buying Bostons or penny Bolsters at lunch noon; or milk early Saturday morning when all is so blue and sweet for the day of the play. Cherry trees drops blossoms in May. The funny gladness of the cat rubbing against the porch steps in the drowsy two o'clock when Mrs. Cassidy with her littlest daughter returns from shopping at Kresge's downtown, gets off the bus at the junction, walks seven houses down Massachusetts Street with her bundles, the ladies see her, call out “What'd you buy Mrs. Cassidy? Is that fire sale still on at Giant store?”

“Radio says it is . . .” another greeter.

“Wasnt you on the Strand program on the sidewalk interviews?—Tom Wilson asked the silliest questions—Hee hee hee!”

Then among themselves “That little girl must have rickets the way she walks—”

“Those cakes she gave me yesterday I just had to throw them away—”

And the sun beams gladly on the woman at the gate of her house. “Now where can Maggie be? I told her a dozen times I wanted that wash hung out before I got back even if it was eleven o'clock—”

And at night the river flows, it bears pale stars on the holy water, some sink like veils, some show like fish, the great moon that once was rose now high like a blazing milk flails its white reflection vertical and deep in the dark surgey mass wall river's grinding bed push. As in a sad dream, under the streetlamp, by pocky unpaved holes in dirt, the father James Cassidy comes home with lunchpail and lantern, limping, redfaced, and turns in for supper and sleep.

Now a door slams. The kids have rushed out for the last play, the mothers are planning and slamming in kitchens, you can hear it out in swish leaf orchards, on popcorn swings, in the million-foliaged sweet wafted night of sighs, songs, shushes. A thousand things up and down the street, deep, lovely, dangerous, aureating, breathing, throbbing like stars; a whistle, a faint yell; the flow of Lowell over rooftops beyond; the bark on the river, the wild goose of the night yakking, ducking in the sand and sparkle; the ululating lap and purl and lovely mystery on the shore, dark, always dark the river's cunning unseen lips murmuring kisses, eating night, stealing sand, sneaky.

“Mag-gie!” the kids are calling under the railroad bridge where they've been swimming. The freight train still rumbles over a hundred cars long, the engine threw the flare on little white bathers, little Picasso horses of the night as dense and tragic in the gloom comes my soul looking for what was there that disappeared and left, lost, down a path—the gloom of love. Maggie, the girl I loved.

In winter night Massachusetts Street is dismal, the ground's frozen cold, the ruts and pock holes have ice, thin snow slides over the jagged black cracks. The river is frozen to stolidity, waits; hung on a shore with remnant show-off boughs of June—Ice skaters, Swedes, Irish girls, yellers and singers—they throng on the white ice beneath the crinkly stars that have no altar moon, no voice, but down heavy tragic space make halyards of Heaven on in deep, to where the figures fantastic amassed by scientists cream in a cold mass; the veil of Heaven on tiaras and diadems of a great Eternity Brunette called night.

Among these skaters Maggie performed; in her sweet white skates, white muff, you see the flash of her eye in their pools of darkness all the more strikingly: the pinkness of her cheek, her hair, the crown of her eyes corona'd by God's own bent wing—For all I knew as I toasted my skated feet at Concord River fires in the February Lowell, Maggie could have been the mother or the daughter of God—

Dirty snow piled in the gutters of Massachusetts Street, something forlorn hid in little pits of dirt, dark—the mute companions of my midnight walks from the overpowering lavish of her kisses.

She gave me a kiss upsidedown in the chair, it was a winter night not long after I'd met her, I was in the dark room with the big radio with its throbbish big brown dial that Vinny also had in his house and I'm rocking in the chair, Mrs. Cassidy her mother is in her own kitchen the way my mother three miles across town was—same old big old good old Lowell lady in her eternity wiping the dishes putting them away in the clean cupboards with that little feminate neatness and orderly ideas of how to go about things—Maggie's on the porch goofing in the icy night a minute with Bessy Jones her chum from the bungalow across the street, a big fat red-haired goodnatured girl with freckles and whose inconceivably feeble little brother sometimes delivered me notes from Maggie written the night before school in some brown light of her bedroom or in the morning at pipe keen frost, to hand to him, over the crackly fence, and he in his usual round of days trudged to school two miles away or took the bus and as he rheumy-eyedly weepingly came into his Spanish class which was every morning the second and impossibly dull he handed me the note sometimes with a feeble little joke—just a little kid, for some reason they'd shoved him on to high school through red morning cold parochials where he skipped grades and missed the sixth, or fifth, or both, and here he was a little kid with a hunting rag cap with a Scottish haggle tassel and we believed him to be like our age. Maggie would plant the note in his thin freckly hand, Bessy'd be giggling from behind the open kitchen window, she's taking advantage of the window being open and also putting the empty milk-bottles out. Little Massachusetts Street in the cold mornings of rosy snow sun in January is alive with the fragrant whip of blacksmoke from all the cottage chimneys; on the white frozen cap of the Concord River we see last night's bonfire a charred ruinous black spot near the thin bare reddish reeds of the other shore; the whistle of the Boston and Maine engine sounds across the trees, you shudder and pull your coat tighter to hear it. Bessy Jones . . . sometimes she'd write notes to me too, giving instructions on how to win Maggie, that Maggie'd also read. I accepted everything.

“Maggie loves you,” etc., “she's madder about you than I can ever remember her being mad about anybody else” and in effect she'd say “Maggie loves you, but dont try her patience—tell her you want to marry her or sumptin.” Young girls—giggly—on the porch—as I sit in the living-room dark waiting for Maggie to come back on the chair with me. My tired track team legs are beneath me, folded. I hear other voices on the Cassidy porch, some boys, that Art Swenson I heard about—I feel jealousy but it's only the bare beginning of all the jealousy that came later. I'm waiting for Maggie to come and kiss me, make it official. While waiting I have ample time to review our love affair; how the first night she'd meant nothing to me when we danced, I held her, she seemed small, thin, dark, unsubstantial, not important enough—Just her strange rare sadness coming from the other side of something made me barely notice she was there: her pretty looks . . . all girls had pretty looks, even G.J. hadnt mentioned her. . . . The profundity wave of her womanhood had not yet settled over me. That was New Year's Eve—after the dance we'd walked home in the cold night, the snow was over, just tight and soft on the implacable frozen ground, we passed long construction oil flares like avenues and parades on our way down to South Lowell and the banks of the Concord—the silent frost on the rooftops in the starlight, ten degrees above zero. “Sit on the porch awhile anyway—” There were little children-whimpering understandings between us that we would join our lips and kiss even if we had to do it outdoors—The thought of it had begun to excite me even then. But now, waiting in the chair, and why worry about time, the meaning of her
kissed
had become all things to me. In the variety of the tone of her words, moods, hugs, kisses, brushes of the lips, and this night the upside-down kiss over the back of the chair with her dark eyes heavy hanging and her blushing cheeks full of sweet blood and sudden tenderness brooding like a hawk over the boy over the back, holding the chair on both sides, just an instant, the startling sudden sweet fall of all her hair over my face and the soft downward brush of her lips, a moment's penetration of sweet lip flesh, a moment's drowned in thinking and kissing in it and praying and hoping and in the mouth of life when life is young to burn cool skin eye-blinking joy—I held her captured upside down, also for just a second, and savored the kiss which first had surprised me like blind man's bluff so I didnt know really who was kissing me for the very first instant but now I knew and knew everything more than ever, as, grace-wise, she descended to me from the upper dark where I'd thought only cold could be and with all her heavy lips and breast in my neck and on my head and sudden fragrance of the night brought with her from the porch, of some 5 & 10 cheap perfumes of herself the little hungry scent of perspiration warm in her flesh like preciousness.

I held her a long time, even when she struggled to fall back. I realized she'd done it for a mood. She loved me. Also I think we were both frightened later when we'd hold a kiss for 35 minutes until the muscles of our lips would get cramps and it was painful to go on—but somehow we were supposed to do this, and what everybody said, the other kids, Maggie and all the others “necking” at skate and post office parties and on porches after dances had learned this was the thing—and did it in spite of how they felt about it personally—the fear of the world, the children clinging in what they think is a mature, secure kiss (challenging and grown-up)—not understanding joy and personal reverence—It's only later you learn to lean your head in the lap of God, and rest in love. Some gigantic sexual drive was behind these futile long smooches, sometimes our teeth'd grind, our mouths burn from interchanged spittle, our lips blister, bleed, chap—We were scared.

I lay there on my side with my arm around her neck, my hand gripped on her rib, and I ate her lips and she mine. There were interesting crises. . . . No way to go further without fighting. After that we'd just sit and gab in the black of the parlor while the family slept and the radio played low. One night I heard her father come in the kitchen door—I had no idea then of the great fogs rolling over fields by the sea in Nova Scotia and the poor little cottages in lost storms, sad work, wintry work in the bottom of life, the sad men with pails who walk in fields—the new form of the sun every morning—Ah I loved my Maggie, I wanted to eat her, bring her home, hide her in the heart of my life the rest of my days. I prayed in Sainte Jeanne d'Arc church for the grace of her love; I'd almost forgotten . . .

Let me sing the beauty of my Maggie. Legs:—the knees attached to the thighs, knees shiny, thighs like milk. Arms:—the levers of my content, the serpents of my joy. Back:—the sight of that in a strange street of dreams in the middle of Heaven would make me fall sitting from glad recognition. Ribs?—she had some melted and round like a well formed apple, from her thigh bones to waist I saw the earth roll. In her neck I hid myself like a lost snow goose of Australia, seeking the perfume of her breast. . . . She didnt let me, she was a good girl. The poor big alley cat with her, though almost a year younger, had black ideas about her legs that he hid from himself, also in his prayers didnt mention . . . the dog. Across the big world darkness I've come, in boat, in bus, in airplane, in train standing my shadow immense traversing the fields and the redness of engine boilers behind me making me omnipotent upon the earth of the night, like God—but I have never made love with a little finger that has won me since. I gnawed her face with my eyes; she loved that; and that was bastardly I didnt know she loved me—I didnt understand.

“Jack—,” after we'd had all our conversations about the kids she fiddled with all day, while I was at school and since I'd last seen her, the gossip, things of high school kids talking about others their age, the stories, rumors, news of the dance, of marriage . . . “Jack, marry me some day.”

“Yes, yes, always—nobody else.”

“You sure there's nobody else?”

“Well
who
could be?” I didnt love the girl Maggie was jealous of, Pauline, who'd found me standing in the gang of football players one night in autumn at a dance where I'd gone because there was a banquet for the players and a basketball game we wanted to see, boy stuff—I was waiting in the corner for the dance to end, the idea of dancing with a girl was impossible but I had it concealed—She picked me out of a corner like young men dream. She said, “Hey I like you!—you're bashful, I like bashful people!” and drew me tremblingly excitingly to the floor, great eyes in mine, and pulled my body and hers and squeezed me interestingly and made me “dance” to talk, to get acquainted—the smell of her hair was killing me! In her door at home she was looking at me with the moon in her eyes, saying, “If you wont kiss me I'll kiss you” and opened the screendoor I'd just closed and gave me a cool kiss—We had talked about kisses looking at each other's mouths all night; we had said we werent interested in such things—“I'm a good girl, I believe in h-hmmm—kissing”—flutter—“but I mean I wouldnt allow anything beyond that to happen”—like in New England the girls—“but you've got bedroom eyes, hey. Did I tell ya about the guy I didnt know who put his arm around me at the Girl Officers' Ball?” She was a Girl Officer.

“What?”

“Dont you want to know if I asked him to take his hands off me—?”

“Yeah?”

“Dont be silly, I dont talk to strangers.”

Pauline, brown hair, blue eyes, the great glistening stars in her lips—She too lived near a river, the Merrimack, but near the highway, the big bridge, the big carnival and football field—you could see the factories across the river. I spent many afternoons there conversing with her in the snow, about kisses, before meeting Maggie. All of a sudden one night she opens the damned door and kisses me—big stuff! The first night I met her all I could do was smell her hair in my bed, in my hair—told this to Lousy, I smelt her in his hair too. It interested Lousy. When I told him we'd finally kissed the night before (sitting with him on my bed with the gang G.J. Scotty Iddyboy sitting in chairs of my bedroom after supper talking about the team my mother doing the dishes my father at the radio) Lousy wanted me to kiss him like I had kissed Pauline. We did it, too; the others didnt even stop talking about the team. But now Maggie was another matter—her kisses, an expensive wine, we dont have much, nor often—hidden in the earth—limited, like Napoleon brandy—pretty soon no more. Marry, love somebody else? Impossible. “I love only you, Maggie,” I tried to say, no more success than with G.J. the little boy loves of puberty. I tried to assure her that she would never have cause for jealousy, truly. Enough of singing—I'll sing later—the story of Maggie—the beginning of my jealousy, the things that happened.

The mortality in my heart is heavy, they're going to throw me in a hole already eaten by the dogs of dolor like a sick Pope who's played with too many young girls the black tears flowing from his skeleton-hole eyes.

Ah life, God—we wont find them any more the Nova Scotias of flowers! No more saved afternoons! The shadows, the ancestors, they've all walked in the dust of 1900 seeking the new toys of the twentieth century just as Céline says—but it's still love has found us out, and in the stalls was nothing, eyes of drunken wolves was all. Ask the guys at the war.